"Narrative fiction provides a controlled wilderness, an opportunity to be and to become the Other. The stranger. With sympathy, clarity, and the risk of self-examination. In this iteration, for me the author, Beloved the girl, the haunter, is the ultimate Other. Clamoring, forever clamoring for a kis"
"Much of the alarm hovering at the borders, the gates, is stoked, it seems to be, by 1) both the threat and the promise of globalization; and 2) an uneasy relationship with our own foreignness, our own rapidly disintegrating sense of belonging."
""Empire," "internationalism," "one world," "universal"——all seem less like categories of historical trends and more like yearnings. Yearnings to corral the earth into some semblance of unity and some measure of control, or to conceive of the planet's human destiny as flowing from one constellation o"